This excommunication meant that the families were no longer allowed to join other conservative settlements as many conservative affiliations of the Amish practice "strict shunning" (German: strenge Meidung), which requires that the person who is excommunicated must return to their former bishop and confess their sins to be able to join another strict shunning community.
At a June 2006 meeting in Pennsylvania, many Amish bishops also expressed that they felt that the ban of so many families from Bergholz should not be applied according to tradition.
Raymond Hershberger, a bishop who not related to the Bergholz Community but opposed them, was also victim of a beard cutting attack.
[6] In September 2012, a group of 16 Amish men and women from Bergholz, Ohio, were convicted on federal hate crime and conspiracy charges, including Samuel Mullet, who did not participate in the five hair- and beard-cutting attacks but was tried as the leader of the campaign.
[11] Due to the cloistered nature of Amish lifestyle, they are often reluctant to bring complaints to local police[12] who describe the attacks as "very rare".